Grow and manage your audience like a pro

Miles: Hello, everybody. Welcome to our…to the Emma webinar called “List Management: How to Grow, Reengage, and Manage your Subscribers like a Pro.” This is our first customer webinar for 2019, so we’re really excited to have you. Let me walk you through. I’m Miles Price. I’m on our product marketing team here at Emma and I’m joined by Tyler Sutton. Hey, Tyler.

Tyler: Hey, man. Hey, I’m Tyler and I am an email specialist on our professionals services team.

Miles: Cool. Well, really excited to be here today, talking to you guys about list management, some different ways to grow your subscribers, how to re-engage with them over the course of the next year, and ultimately, how to have a healthy list. And just a little of kind of a back story on this, a lot of the feedback from our last customer webinar, which is the Emma issue webinar at the end of last year, kind of informs our next topic. So this is it, you guys picked it, so we’re really excited to go ahead and get started.

So just to give you a run through of what we’re gonna talk to today, just kind of some methods on kicking off the new year right with your email marketing program, how to use the built-in sign-up forms within your Emma account to grow your list over the course of the year, some different tools inside the account to keep your subscribers engaged, and some list hygiene and list management technique that we recommend just to maintain that healthy list. And then we got some time at the end for Q&A. So without further ado, let’s go ahead and get started. Welcome to 2019.

Tyler: It’s here.

Miles: It’s here. It’s January, what, 22nd? And a lot of you are probably looking at your marketing strategy and wondering, okay, so last year was great, did a lot of really good things, but maybe there are some opportunities for improvement. This is a great time to do it. We see brands from all different types of industries using the new year to kind of reinvent themselves, maybe make some tweaks to their marketing channels and trying to drive more traffic to email or maybe drive more traffic to social, this is a good opportunity to do it.

So as you’re doing that in the new year, we kind of got some questions that are really helpful to answer when you’re looking at a new strategy. So number one, for email, what does your subscriber journey look like? You know, how are you driving new business, new leads, new customers to sign up to your emails? And then, what happens once they’re in there? You know, once they’re in your Emma account, how are you engaging with them? What kind of content are you sending to them? And then that kind of leads into question number two, what are your goals? Is it a revenue-driven strategy? Or is it a content-based strategy? Just that helps inform, like what kind of emails you’re gonna be building to send them? And then ultimately, what’s the unique value of your brands? What’s gonna set you apart in the market as an email marketer, as a brand that’s gonna drive people to sign up your emails and ultimately engage with your brand and buy more stuff?

So with that, we’re gonna go into some really helpful list growth tips. With your Emma account, you have plenty of opportunities to use the tools inside the account to grow your list, but we’re gonna highlight some of the more popular methods. Number one, being able to collect those new subscribers anywhere you can. That means through your website, maybe events you go to. There are all these opportunities to get brand new subscribers that are gonna end up being, you know, repeat customers. So make sure that you’re collecting them.

Tyler: Also, I think the instinct there for…be on the ground level work with customers on day-to-day basis, I think the instinct there is once you have your sign-up form set, or however you’re collecting your subscribers, once you have all that set, the instinct there for some reason is to not go back and look at that and see where you can optimize that and adjust it to make it better. You know, where are opportunities that you’re not collecting right now? So definitely encourage you, even if you have a what you think is a pretty solid list growth strategy, go back, this is the perfect time of the year, like Miles is saying, to go back and actually sit down and take a look at, “Okay, we have X, Y, Z methods of collecting, where are the gaps? Where can we fill in to better grow our list and extend our reach?”

Miles: And one of first ways you would do that is figure out where are you collecting customer information? Like, where are these sign-up forms located? In your Emma account, you can actually use lightbox or also known as pop-up forms to use kind of the immediacy of someone navigating through your website to collect that information. I think we’re all probably familiar with navigating to some of these website and immediately be presented with the form “Sign up now to receive 15% off.” That’s a lightbox form. They’re incredibly effective. They perform two times as well as just regular static forms. So use this to your advantage, you know, this is a great way to create some immediacy when people show up to your website, really drive an offer perhaps. So you got to take advantage of that. And just to let you guys know, we are gonna be running through how to build some of these. So I was gonna pop into an Emma account in a little bit, so pretty excited for that demo.

So lightbox forms perform twice as well as static forms, but don’t forget that those static forms are really an important part of your subscriber program. A lot of our customers actually use both hand in hand, in tandem. So you have a lightbox form pop up when somebody immediately navigates to your site, but as they stay on the site or maybe leave that form, they’re also presented with that option maybe down in the footer or maybe it’s in a nav bar somewhere. Use that opportunity to still be able to collect those subscribers.

Tyler: Yeah, and if you wanted to take it even a step further, you know, if you’re not currently implementing a lightbox, test that. You know, put a lightbox on your website for a couple of weeks and then see what happens there. Same thing with the static form, test the location of it. So some people like the footer, some people like the header. I tend to actually to lean a little bit more towards the header. It’s a little more prominent, real stay on the website. It can catch a website visitor’s eyes a little bit better. But definitely test that, consider the location of the forms as well.

Miles: Yup. Okay. So lightbox, embedded forms on the page, these are good online ways to collect subscribers, but I think we might be also familiar with the legal pad method. I’ve gone to plenty of business and signed up for emails that’s right there on a notepad, maybe in a point-of-sale location. That’s a great way to do it, but we also recognize that maybe there’s a better way to collect that information digitally, and actually have an opportunity to collect the right information.

So we actually have an iPad app, we call it Guestbook, that lets you collect new subscribers anywhere your business is. So whether it’s at your POS or maybe you’re at in events away from your business or maybe there’s an outside festival and you have a good setup. Our iPad app, Guestbook, lets your collect those subscribers right there at the location even if you don’t have Wi-Fi. You know, we’ve both been to conferences where Wi-Fi can get pretty spotty, and you know, using a computer may not be the best experience. With this, you can still collect those new subscribers, they’re saved right on your iPad, and it’s connected to your Emma account using your login. So as soon as you do have an internet connection, everything syncs right to the group. So this is a great way to collect those subscribers anywhere.

Tyler: Yeah, super simple to set up. There’s no integration work being done. As long as you had your Emma login in your iPad, you can sync it up.

Miles: And there’s some really other great ways to grow your list, too. A lot of business have a CRM like Salesforce. We have an integration with Salesforce so that you can connect those leads, those new prospects right into your Emma account and back and forth. You can import a CSV file if it’s coming over from another system. Also, any additional integrations. A lot of our customers use platforms like Eventbrite to track ticket sales, any kind of RSVP information. This is great for, you know, reengaging with those customers that have attended one of your events.

Tyler: Yeah, if you have any questions or maybe just a little bit more curious about some of the additional opportunities that we have to sync with different platforms, head over to myemma.com/integrations. It has all the break down of all of our really great partners.

Miles: Yup. And so now we kind of covered a bunch of different ways to grow your list. It’s a good idea to just go ahead and revisit some best practices around that. When you’re building and hosting your sign-up forms, go ahead and make sure that you’ve set clear expectations for the information that you’re gathering. You know, why are you gathering this information? What are your intentions? Use this opportunity to include a compelling value proposition, you know, why should somebody sign up for this? You know, maybe that’s an offer, you know, 15% off sign up right now. Or maybe, sign up to get exclusive content down the road.

Tyler: I think that that’s one thing that I’ve seen as well, that whenever some of our customers see the words “value proposition” or think about promoting some type of incentive on a sign-up form, they automatically think of a monetary incentive. So I got to produce this free coupon or this 20% off coupon, and that’s not necessarily the case. So what I would encourage is that you think about that what makes sense for your business, what do you think that your customers find valuable. So that may just be in your knowledge of your customer, you may have some data to back that up perhaps, but think about what’s valuable. If it’s a 20% off coupon, great, let’s put it on there. If it’s just exclusive content or valuable content that may help your subscribers utilize your product better or engage with your brand better. Seen examples of both, and seen both examples work really well. So just think about that whenever you’re thinking about that value proposition.

Miles: Exactly. And finally, use this opportunity to collect the right data, maybe just the necessary data. I would say raise your hands if you had a sign-up form experience where you’ve been asked to…you’ve seen the required fields of like first name and email, but also like fax number and street address when maybe that stuff’s not really relevant. Ultimately, what you wanna do is collect the necessary information that make it’s easier for them to sign up, but also you’re not gathering information that you may not do anything with later down the road. And if you do wanna collect that information now that they’ve signed up, you can use email as a vehicle to get that information later on if it’s relevant.

Tyler: Yeah, absolutely. So just a quick sack to chew on there, just to think about…because there’s a lot of questions around when you are setting up sign-up forms or any sort of, you know, list collection method, you know, what forms do you put on the form get asked that a ton? So something to consider is that with each field that you add to your form, we call that kind of like a buried entry is maybe another term that you have heard. So with each field that you add to a form, you can actually reduce your sign up conversion by 25%. So just keep that in mind. That’s not a stat to scare you, and, you know, you have to just have one field on your forms, that’s not necessarily true. Just being considerate about how many fields are on your form.

And then another good thing to think about is what are the must haves for you to be able to do your best email marketing? What are the must haves and what are the nice to haves? And as Miles mentioned, some of the nice to haves maybe things like, you know, postal code, or you know, first name. You may not need that right of the gate, so you can actually ask for that a little bit later on down the road or even honestly included in the welcome email is another great way to do it, to get or capture that additional information.

Miles: We’re gonna talk about some of those fields later and how they can kind of help you target more relevant kinda content to your customers, too. So with that, I’m gonna hand it over to Tyler and he’s gonna walk us through an Emma account and using sign-up forms.

Tyler: Yeah, so get to fun stuff. So we’re gonna go back to the audience tab here your Emma account pulled up, feel free to move along with us. We’ll be moving through a lot of these features here. So definitely move along with us. If you have any questions about any of the features that you see here, as Miles mentioned, we do have a Q&A session at the end, so feel free to just drop your questions in the questions chat of your GoToWebinar control panel. We’ll get to those.

So we’re gonna talk about sign-up forms here and we have, as we mentioned before, we have two different options for sign-up forms. And if you are following along, we are under the audience tab, and then under forms in the side bar. So we’re gonna cover lightbox first. So create a lightbox form here, and this is that pop-up form. So a really easy nine-step process to set up a form. So you’ll just essentially name your form up here. You can grab a…let’s see if we can just grab this URL here. So this is where the form is desired to be published. So we’ll just enter our email, or excuse me, our website address there. You’ll be able to set the fields for the form. Again, considering those, you know, those fields that are the must haves, maybe email is just our must have, but you know, perhaps, for someone else they really would love to have or need to have the first name and staffer locations, so we’ll add a couple of fields there. You will be able to adjust those fields, if you can see there, to be able to set the field order.

And then moving on to step four, we actually have some options for you to make sure that every form is compliant. We have some options for you to add that, so things like email consent, event linking to your own privacy policy. If you have any questions about which one to choose for your particular form, definitely consult your legal counsel. They’ll be able to provide some guidance there, but just know that we do have the tools in place so that you can stay compliant with any sign-up form that you produce through Emma.

Moving along, we do have an option to actually set the…or excuse me, adjust the content of the form so that we can adjust the brand colors by either selecting from the color spectrum or even dropping in your custom hex code colors. So a lot of you have personal branding, which is great. So you can adjust it accordingly there. You know, adjusting the body copy and even the button and the field color as well.

Step six would be assigning it to a group, so this is gonna be based off these audience groups in your account. And then finally, step seven, you actually will be able to adjust locations, so maybe you want it on a specific page or maybe not on a specific page, you can delineate that there. And then you can also adjust the timing. So you might wanna set it to pop up immediately, but also maybe you wanna put a 10-second delay on there and test that to see if that maybe converts more subscribers giving them a little bit of a, you know, a break, or a little bit of time on your website to able to cruise around before that form pops up or even after a certain number of page views as well.

Miles: I think this is a good opportunity to be a little bit more strategic in how you’re collecting your subscribers. You know, if you’ve built like a landing page that maybe is driving event registrations or something, you know, you can create a certain sign-up form with a certain type of message just for that. And you can also use this panel, the display details to really drill down into a specific type of experience. So as they’re scrolling through the page, it pops up after a certain amount of time so that you’re catching them before they maybe navigate away, but it’s not bombarding them right as soon as they hit the top of the page.

Tyler: Exactly, exactly. And the features that you have in building, whether it’s a lightbox form or a sign-up form are so customizable to really help you, again, to be super relevant, to be timely with the sign-up form, and be strategic about how you’re displaying that to your customers. So even in step eight, it will allow you to adjust the thank you message there. And then finally, we’ll just save and activate your form, and we’ll do all the light work by generating a script. So you don’t have to know code or anything like that. We’ve done the script work for you. So just simply copy and paste here. You could even just copy it to your clipboard right there and then you just wanna paste that on your website, typically in the footer of your website, and that form is gonna be alive. So super simple setup process.

Miles: I think that’s nice because as email marketers we’re not always web developers. Some of us might be, but just being able to grab that code snippet, pop it in your website, super easy.

Tyler: Yeah, if you are a web developer and you are out there, us marketers need your help. We need you. We need you. So that’s the lightbox form. That’s the pop-up form. We’re gonna go back and take a look at the, what’s labeled as a sign-up form here, which is gonna be that static or embedded form. So create a new form here, and the first step that I take whenever I’m creating a new sign-up form is just to rename your form. It’s gonna be default with a new sign up or we can rename that Webinar Form here. Maybe we wanna do Webinar Static Form to distinguish that between our lightbox.

We can set email notifications here depending on if someone signs up and you want to be notified about it weekly, daily, or every time someone joins. We do have reCAPTCHA built in for all of our sign-up forms. So this is gonna help against spam.

Miles: Spambots.

Tyler: Yeah, spambots, troublesome. We wanna make sure that you’re protected there. So we do have reCAPTCHA built in. And as we scroll down, you will have the option to adjust the look of the form as well. So you can come on, drop in your logo. We’ve got a couple of logos already loaded up here. So wait for that to adjust. We’re gonna drop in our own logo here and adjust the size of it. We can add some alt text here. From this setting here, you can adjust the body copy. So if you have your specific fonts or email say fonts, you can adjust that, even the color. You wanna adjust that to your own branding.

And then as far as adding fields to the forms, it’s really easy. So all your contact fields are listed out here. There is…it might be little hard to see from this view, but there’s a hide column here and then a required column. So to simply add a field to a form, just simply uncheck the hide column, and that’s gonna add that field to the form if you wanted to require that. So let’s go find, I mean, birthday and maybe staffer location, and then let’s say you wanna require staffer location, you can require that field really easily.

The last and most important step in building your sign-up form is going to be the assign it to the group. This is a really important step. If you don’t take this step, then this form isn’t gonna be synced anywhere. It’ll be synced into what we call limbo status, which is your contacts will be in your account. They’ll be free floating and you won’t be sending them any content. So you make sure you don’t miss this step. Just simply add to a group. You can come on, you’ll see all of your audience groups already set here and then just simply under the add column, just add that to a group. So that is any sign-ups that go through this form automatically sync to that particular group.

And from here, we’ll publish the sign-up form. And we have a lot of different options for those as well. So if you wanna link out to it, if you wanted to use the iframe code to maybe embed it to your website, lots of flexibility here on how you display this form as well.

Miles: Cool, awesome. That screen again. All right. So Tyler just walked us through some really great ways to use those lightbox and static forms on your website. Again, use those in tandem. Those are really valuable tools that can drive new subscribers, but neither one is better than the other. I see brands use the static form with actual URL to the sign-up form on Twitter all the time, but that same brand would also have a separate lightbox form on their website that pops up. So it’s a great way to use those two together.

So now, that was a great segment on list growth and using those tools inside Emma to get more subscribers. Let’s talk about, once they get in the door, how are you gonna keep them engaged. Number one, segmentation. I think we’ve all probably heard the term segmentation as it relates to email marketing, but it may not be something that everybody is really taking advantage of. To make sure that your subscribers are gonna stay interested in your emails, you have to serve up relevant and engaging content and messaging, and segmentation is the easiest way to make sure that you’re doing that. And the best way is to segment are gonna vary by your brand, by your subscribers and your industry, but we wanted to kind of outline some of the best ways to kind of get started with that. And some of the best ways to segment, we’ve kind of sectioned them off into two groups, two segments.

Number one is based on the data that you’ve already collected using those sign-up forms. So those data fields like birthday, ZIP code, that kind of information, you can take that, build a segment, and see everybody that lives in Portland, Oregon. You can see anybody that has a birthday that’s before December 31st, 1990. This is a good way to kind of identify who your core audience is and then deliver targeted messaging to them. You can segment how they signed up. So did they sign up from a landing page that you’ve built, or maybe they signed up the Guestbook app or using, you know, you maybe have a legal pad that they’re addressed down on. Segment from their information coming over from Salesforce or your CRM of choice. And last one is you can segment based on how they want to receive your emails. At the bottom of every email, I think we’re all familiar with the manage preferences link. This lets people, they can choose what content they receive from you. You can segment based on that. So if somebody only wants to receive seasonal offers that you designated content through then you can segment based on that.

And then the second category is based on your subscribers’ response history. This is really interesting because it lets you kind of have a more inside look into the engagement of how your emails are performing. You can build these segments that are showing who’s most active, who constantly opens, who’s always clicking the links in your emails, but also who’s not doing that. This is a really good way to find out, you know, maybe I need to focus on this group of people that are being so engaged with my emails.

Tyler: Yeah, I think some of you may look at the content on left hand side in regards to using that data and think, “Yeah, well, that’s great for maybe, like, a retail brand who probably has some data of things, like, you know, specific product purchase or last day of purchase.” You know, it’s great for someone like that, but my business we don’t have all of that. We don’t have a CRM, you know, we don’t have extensive data collected on our subscribers that we can use to segment. And so sometimes I find with that mindset, the right content, the segmenting by responses gets written off a little bit, but it is an incredible opportunity for you to be able to segment your list and deliver relevant content, to pay attention to how your subscribers are interacting with the content that you’re sending them and then segment based off of that. So don’t overlook that. I think it’s widely underused in my opinion and it definitely a great… So feel empowered to…if you don’t have data, if you don’t have a CRM, feel empowered to go into our response tool and go into segmentation tool in Emma, and base your subscribers and base your knowledge of your subscribers off of this engagement segments here.

Miles: Yes, I think a good way to look at it is that you got this entire collection of subscribers, but they all have different needs. So rather than sending, we call it like a batch and blast concept, so like one email to your entire email list, separate those, your audience into particular groups using the segment builder inside of Emma, and that way you can fill their inboxes with content that they actually wanna read. I’ll share some interesting segmentation steps.

Segmenting campaigns actually lead to a 760% increase revenue. Almost 40% of email marketers that practice list segmentation see obviously better open rates and around 25% see increase sales leads. That was from eMarketer about a year ago. And 56% of people unsubscribed from emails because they’re getting content that’s no longer relevant to them. That’s a big one. I think a lot of that has to do with, you know, over the course of time whether it’d be a year or two years, at that moment that they signed up, they were like hyper-engaged. Maybe they saw an offer, they signed up, they wanted to take advantage of that, and then over the course of the year, maybe they weren’t delivered the content that really mattered to them. Maybe they were getting offers that, you know, didn’t pertain to them. Maybe it was a location-based thing. This is a really good opportunity to use all of that data that you have collected. Anything that you’ve gotten on your customers, you can segment based on it. So use it, it’s in your account, it’s ready for the taking.

Tyler: Yeah, that’s right. I’m actually thinking about a year ago, I was working with a brand, I actually still work with them today, but for months on end, I was recommending to them, “We have to segment your list. We need to figure out ways to better segment your audience,” because they were sending the mass blast. And finally, actually at the beginning of the year, last year, you know, kind of been challenging them to rethink some of their goals and look at some different concepts. At the beginning of the year last year they said, “Okay, fine. What do you have on segmentation?” We actually sat down and look at some of the steps that Miles had already referenced and some other resources. And they were more so, like, show me a way that you can measure that success and then we’ll consider it. And so that’s exactly what we did. So the stats are there to back up the power of segmentation, the power of delivering relevant content. And so, you know, we implemented a couple of different methods of segmentation with them, they’ve shown great success because of that. So, you know, segmentation is for you, even if you don’t think it is. It’s just figuring out what works specifically for your brand.

Miles: Cool. All right, with that, Tyler, you wanna walk us through building segments in Emma?

Tyler: Yeah, let’s jump in. And some of you, again, may have used segments before, some of you may not, so we’ll walk through just some basic concepts. If you have specific questions, feel free to drop those in. But we’re still under the audience tab if you’re following along under segments. We moved up from forms to segments. And then we got a couple of segments already built here, but we’ll create a couple of new segments.

So you just essentially name your segment whatever you want, and then you’ve got four different criteria to choose from. So this is, the first one’s gonna be audience group. So some of you have multiple groups or your multiple lists in your account. And you can say whether a contact is in or not in a specific group, and that may help you to filter down your audience to a specific group so that you maybe looking for something a little bit even further with that segment.

So the second criteria is gonna be fields. So this is based off of those contact fields that you have. There’s additional data points. So things like first name or birthday, state, staffer location, team, whatever it may be for you. And then we also have response data. This is the second or really the third option here. So based on whether a subscriber has or has not received, opened or click, we’re gonna get into how to demonstrate that here in a second. And then finally sign up activity. So if you’re using Emma sign-up forms, which form are your customers are coming through, how many subscribers did you have sign up through this specific form within the last three months, all options that you can utilize in segmentation.

And so let’s actually build out a test segment here. So we’re gonna choose of based off of audience group. We wanna be able to learn specific with our contacts here. [inaudible 00:32:17] this 2019 Emma staff list, and if you haven’t… Yeah, go ahead.

Miles: Oh, one thing I wanted to point out real quick. The segment builder is really cool in that it shows live updating numbers right here on the right. So any time you adjust the criteria, you’re gonna get a live look at how many contacts are in that segment. And also, the percentage of your overall audience, how many people are in there? I think that’s a really handy feature because oftentimes, like, you wanna see a volume. You’re doing this because you would like to…you know, you’re trying to test out, like, what segment is best. So ultimately, if you wanna see, you know, your most valuable customers over six month period, you know, you wanna see that number move.

Tyler: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, keep your eyes on those counters up there and we’ll start to build out the rest of the segment. So we’ll use and/or logic, and if you’re not familiar, just really quickly, AND meaning that whatever criteria that you set, the context in that segment have to meet all of those criteria. If we’re OR, that means that they could meet any of the criteria. So it could be one, it could be all of them. So that’s just a quick difference there. We’ll use AND for this specific segment and we’re gonna come down and choose staffer location. This is gonna be really important to us and we’ll determine who’s in this Emma staff list and we will determine who are our Nashville staffers. And then we’re going to add a third criteria, and based that off of who opened our specific webinar email that we sent out.

So you can see that doing go down to 65 contacts with 14% of our list opened this specific mailing. So maybe from here, I want to save this segment and then go create maybe some additional webinar information that I wanna send to these subscribers. Maybe a thank you for registering, maybe a thank you for…or maybe some additional information about maybe a time change for the webinar or an agenda. So lots of flexibility with what you can do in segments. And as Miles mentioned, the dynamic nature of those segments help as you move forward, depending on how you set up your segments, some of those will be rolling segments where this will adjust accordingly if you have it built around a specific date range. And so it’s all really helpful in delivering that relevant content.

Miles: Yup. All right. Okay, so we walked through segmentation. The next big category in terms of reengaging your subscribers is automation. And I’m just gonna say it, automated email messaging is probably the easiest and the best way to have a high-performing email strategy. I think like segmentation, it’s a term that email marketers are aware of, but maybe we’re not all implementing as well as we should or [inaudible 00:35:20] at all. And that’s still be okay. It happens. Actually, I think I have a stat in here that about 50% of marketers aren’t using automation. But automation, it sounds robotic, but it really means just sending timely and targeted messages to your subscribers. It’s based on an action or a milestone. And think of those milestones as signing up, making a purchase, renewing a subscription or even having a birthday. And that’s the stuff that’s actually opposite of robotic. Your subscribers want emails that’s personal, relevant, and timely. And they actually create it… Let me go back one slide to that one with the stat. Research shows that customers are so in love with the idea of automation and personalization that they’re 56% more likely to buy from a company who actually knows their name, so pro to personalization first name tag. And 58% more likely to buy from a company who can suggest relevant products. So what kind of boils down to is if you’re tracking what your customers are buying from you and you have the data around, you know, first name, you can actually build a really powerful email program that, you know, is gonna keep these people engaged.

But because it’s kind of daunting and a lot of people are doing it automatically, we wanted to kind of show you some of the four easiest and I’d say most common automation workflows that people set up for email. Number is gonna be the welcome email. This is gonna be the highest performing email for automation and probably that you would ever send. You know, when you think about that example when you show up to somebody’s website, you sign up immediately and you get that email right in your inbox. That is a very critical opportunity to build customer loyalty. I think it’s kind of weird when it doesn’t happen. It’s weird when you go to somebody’s website and you sign up, and I think we’re all expecting something at this point.

Tyler: Yeah, for sure. A couple of reasons why it would be the most engaged email, or one of the most engaged email that you’ll ever send is that’s your introduction. So when someone signs up, that’s a chance for you to tell your brand story, to drive home the value that your bringing to your subscriber customers, and also to deliver that incentive that we talked about earlier that you’ve promised with your sign-up form. So for those three reasons, we see welcome email analytics just through the roof, and I don’t think there’s any sign of it changing.

Miles: Yeah, but stats around that or the…typically, welcome emails have about four times the open rate and five times the clickthrough rate of other emails that you would send. So that is a perfect opportunity right there, like, you could take that stat to your boss and say, “We need to do this,” you know, use that opportunity to drive a program, a deal through those welcome emails. It’s perfect.

Tyler: Done.

Miles: Date-based emails like birthdays, holidays, is a great example of automation to send that stuff out so that you’re not doing it on your own. It’s really easy to set that out, and Tyler is gonna walk you through that in a little bit, but we have an example that we’ve used kind for a while. There’s a local national restaurant and they have kind of made it, they’ve made a practice of sending automated emails based on weather patterns. So they’ll kind of look ahead of time, and if the weather is looking a little shady, they’ll have, like, half off bottle of wine deals, if it’s gonna, like, snow or have an inclement weather. So it’s a good way to kind of set this up ahead of time, send it out, drop some business to your location straight.

Personalized product offers, if you’re paying attention to things that you’re customers are buying, you know, use this as an opportunity to remind them to maybe re-up on the shaving cream that they buy once every three months. And it’s a good opportunity to maybe show them some other things that they may wanna buy.

And lastly, we got link-click emails. You can automate all email series based on the actions that your subscribers tick in the inbox. If they’re clicking a link in your email, you can amp up some relevance on your next message by following up with some more content or maybe complementary content. This is a good way to really just look at how they’re engaging with your emails and following up based on that kind of pattern. So with that, Tyler is gonna walk you through automation.

Tyler: Yeah. As we’re transitioning, I’ll give you a couple of additional points there with automation. We’ll go to automation tab if you’re in your account. But the two really big things that I’ve seen in automation are really, I mean, obviously as a company is, number one, if you actually go back and take a look at these four examples of automated emails, all of these are built around specific milestones. So a sign-up, a birthday, a product purchase, an action, a link-click, these are really big milestones in a subscriber’s life cycle. And so the first element for automation is that they’re timely messages. You’re gonna be able to deliver that relevant content, you know, based on a timely manner surrounding these specific milestones which is really great and that’s why the engagement is so high there.

And then number two, it actually takes work off of your plate. So, you do have to do some leg work there just to set up these workflows. But once you do, you’re gonna be, you know, you don’t have send out…emailing every time someone has a birthday or every time someone, you know, signs up through your sign-up form in your website. You’re not having to manually do that, so automation really takes that work off of your plate, which is really nice as well.

Miles: Alleviate some of the send anxiety that…

Tyler: Oh, yeah, for sure.

Miles: Just hovering over that send button as you’re about to send something to thousands of people. That’s real. So automation is not nearly as daunting for the…

Tyler: For sure. We’ll take a look just basically how do you set up a workflow. We’re under the automation tab here, so we’re gonna create a new workflow. And the way I like to break it down is that automation is set up into six easy steps, and I really do mean easy, and the first one is gonna be to name your workflow, easiest step in the world depending on what you have it set up as. The second step is gonna be to choose your audience, and yes, you can actually toggle between groups and segments here. So depending on, you know, you maybe wanna build a specific segment depending on your specific automation purpose. Third will be to select a trigger event. Now we’ve got trigger events for really any concept that you can dream up in automation setting. The first one is gonna be off of email sign up. We’ll allow you to select that form that you have, that you built in Emma. We have a trigger based off of date-based. Now this is going to be important here. This is going to be based off of contact fields that you have in your account that are date-based contact field. So you’ll notice that we have only two options here, that’s because these are the only date-based contact fields that we have. All the other ones are short answer or…

Miles: So you need to set those up before answer.

Tyler: Yeah, exactly. Something that we’ve planned for sure. But this will allow you to actually set a mailing to send out based around the data that you have in these fields and you can actually set it to send before, on, or after whatever date is in that field. So lots of flexibility there as well.

Field change, this is gonna be based off of these contact fields again. And essentially if a value of a field changes from, let’s say, X to Y, so just depending on your specific situation there, better use, if you do have an integration, that’s a great opportunity to utilize the field change trigger.

And then the last two, link-click on a specific mailing. This is going to give you a list of mailings that you’ve recently sent or that you actually have scheduled to send. And a way to select that mailing and then give you the links that are in that mailing, and then you can choose specifically if a mailing is, you can select the mailing and then the specific link if somebody clicks on that, you can deliver a timely message. And then link-click on any mailing is simply just if you have a consistent URL that’s gonna be in all of your mailing, so maybe it’s the Shop Now button that’s embedded to your template or hard coded as a static element in your template, or maybe it’s a Register button. Whatever it may be, you can enter that URL there, and then if that link is clicked in any mailing that you send out, then you can set up a message to send out. So that’s steps one through four, five and six is gonna be save your workflow and then switch it over to active.

So quickly, I just wanna show you how you might set up a welcome email. So we’re gonna choose the name of our workflow, we’re gonna choose our audience group, our trigger is going to be email sign up, and we’ll based it off of our sign-up form that we built and we didn’t actually renamed that, but…

Miles: I think one of the interesting things here, just to point out real quick, is that you could actually build an automation workflow just on automation workflow just on people that signed up using the Guestbook iPad app. So if you have, like, maybe an event marketing strategy, you know, you’re going to a lot of events, this is a good way for you to tailor content that’s based on that event, just do those new sign-ups.

Tyler: Absolutely.

Miles: Sorry to interrupt.

Tyler: No, that was a great point, yeah. So we just select our trigger here and then simply we will just select our mailing. So we have a nice welcome. We could build out, we can add wait period on here, you know, wait a couple of days, and then we might wanna send out another mailing here. Or we can actually use Emma’s branch logic tool, and depending on the subscriber’s activity on the previous mailing, we can create a choose your own adventure situation. So let’s base on open, for this example, and then if they did open our welcome email, we wanna send them a thank you message. And if they didn’t, you might wanna check just to see if they’re still interested in that offer.

Miles: That’s a good point. The nice thing about branching is you build these emails ahead of time so you can kind of cater the messaging towards the workflow down the line. And if you’re interested in the branching logic, it’s on our Emma probe plan, or Emma plus plan.

Tyler: Plus, yeah.

Miles: Sorry about that. If you don’t see it in your account, let us know. We can get you upgraded. All right. So awesome segment on building segmentation and automation workflows for reengaging your subscribers. Our last section is around just some list hygiene best practices, how to manage and keep that list healthy as you’re growing it throughout the year. So we kind of talked about those methods of segmentation, it really highlights who you’re active and engaged subscribers are, but also lets you shine a light on the people that may have fallen off the engagement level. Maybe they’re opening, but maybe they’re not clicking. Maybe they just haven’t opened in like six months, and that’s kind of a bummer. It happens. Every year about 22%, 23% of your list is gonna become disengaged. This is every single business, every industry. It doesn’t matter, this hygiene list, it’s gonna happen. It’s a natural effect of the subscriber cycle.

So what we can do is highlight some of the ways to kind of combat that and get people in and back engaged with your emails. Best way to do that is re-engagement campaign. So we’ve got four steps with doing that. Number one is figuring out who those unengaged subscribers are. Using the segment tool, so maybe set some criteria. For you, unengaged subscribers may be people that haven’t opened in six months. For another company, it may be people that haven’t clicked in four weeks. These are really simple segments to build right in your account. Number two would be to look at the sending cadence. A lot of people like to just pause sending to them, you know, they kind of set it aside, maybe look at who these people are and come up with a more compelling way to reconnect with them over time.

Tyler: Yeah. And I think another thought there would be that it gives just your subscribers a break. So some of them may not necessarily have, you know, churned in that. The emails are just may be like deactivated or they don’t check it. It may just be that they’re seeing your emails in the account and they’re just not opening them. So I have a lot brands that are coming in my personal inbox that I do that. Maybe I just lost interest and then just don’t think enough to unsubscribe. So I’m still seeing their emails. So what that pause sending allows you do is give your subscribers a break from seeing you in the inbox.

And quick story, a really premiere, well-known clothing brand, I won’t mention which one, did this to me like a year ago. It was like last summer, and I swear it worked. So I got to used to seeing their emails in my inbox, and therefore, it was the whole summer where I subconsciously noticed it, but didn’t really, like, acknowledge it. And around August, they sent me a re-engagement campaign and it worked, and it got me to stay. And actually, I noticed them in my inbox after that.

Miles: I think it kind of breaks the inbox tunnel vision that you get. Because if you don’t unsubscribe from something, you know, you’re seeing it kind of in your inbox probably on a regular cadence and it’s easy to just open it and delete it and not do anything with it and get into that pattern. When you kind of pause, you’re sending to them, like Tyler said, giving them a break, and then that way, you can build that new email series with different messaging that’s kind of a breath of fresh air to their inbox, and it’s gonna, exactly what happened to Tyler, re-engage him and re-engage your subscribers.

Tyler: I kind of was like mad at myself because I kind of was taken by my own game, by my email marketing game, but then they…like you said, it’s a kind of breath of fresh air, for sure.

Miles: And I think another thing to remember too is that it’s not all about… I mean, obviously, you wanna have a large subscriber list, that’s great, but I think it’s more about focusing on keeping a healthy list, and one of the best ways to do that is to break out that larger list into smaller and more targeted segments so that these small groups of people are performing really well with your emails rather than having 100,000 people and 10% engagement, you know.

Tyler: Yeah, you can have the best content in the world, but if people aren’t opening your emails, then it doesn’t really make a difference, right? So definitely consider that.

Miles: And so point number four, decide what to do with your inactive subscribers. These are people who ultimately have just not engaged with that re-engagement campaign and it’s gonna be different for everybody. So there’s no hard and fast rule on what to do, maybe wait before you delete them. You know, add them to a group, call it inactive subscribers, basically lots of brands do that. That way, they’re suppressed from your regular sync ins, but if you have really important company news, prime news to share, you can send that to them.

Tyler: Yeah, I think that the default there for a lot of folks is just to…we’ll go ahead and dive into the demo as we’re running a little bit short on time, but I think the default there for folks is just that, you know, with a re-engagement campaign automatically you have to remove them. In some circumstances, yeah, that’s absolutely the case and that’s what we would recommend, but that’s gonna depend on what is your current engagement rates, you know, how long has this segment been in your list? So are they subscribers from five years ago? Because there’s a big difference than people that, you know, perhaps joined your account in the last year. So there’s a lot of factors that can go into that, and so certainly there are situations where you would want to remove subscribers because, you know, sending to them can have negative effects on your send reputation, but there’s also situations where you might want to send them some different content or maybe even ask them what content they want to receive. Maybe even change, like Miles said, the send cadence, maybe put them to a once a month send rather than every couple of weeks or a once a week, right?

So I wanna show you quickly here, we won’t look at any specific examples of content on re-engagement campaigns, but what I do wanna show you that I think is important is how to build a segment for this that’s appropriate. So we’ll go back into our segment builder and that’s gonna be under the automation tab and then segments, and we’re just gonna call this inactive, if I could spell, subscribers, yeah, okay, there we go, inactive subscribers. So I think one important element is going to be to consider who your audience is. A lot of you have different groups and you’re sending different content to different groups. So that’s, in my mind, a situation where you would want…maybe wanna do a re-engagement campaign, you know, per group. You might wanna do that for your overall list. I think that’s fine as well. But for this, we’re gonna narrow that back down to our staff list. And then we’re gonna come here and say, “Who has not opened any mailing?” and we’ll just do for our circumstance in the last 180 days, which will be 6 months. And you can see that count generated there, so 46%.

And then there’s one criteria that people miss and it’s this one, it’s adding the contact since criteria. So contact since is a default field in your Emma account. That’s actually just the date that this subscriber was added to your account. And the reason that we wanna consider this is that someone who joined your last week has had way less opportunity to receive mailings than someone who joined six months ago. So what we’re gonna do is give it a little bit of padding, we’re gonna go all the way down to not in the last. So their contact since of subscribe date is not in the last, and then we’re just gonna give it a little padding, and we’re just gonna remove anyone that has joined in the last month. So we’ll take that and you can see that go down 5% for our list. So that’s just a good example of how to run a re-engagement segment based on the criteria that you have on your segment builder.

Miles: All right. Okay, so I know we’re running a little bit short on time, but I did want to…we got some really good questions from y’all, wanted to address some of those. We have a question from Emily, “How many fields do you recommend for a sign-up form?” That is, I think, it’s kind of completely up to you and the information that you’re wanting to gather, but I would say best practice, keep it like one to three fields are optimal. Tyler had mentioned there was a point of diminishing returns, the more fields you have…

Tyler: Twenty-five percent.

Miles: You’re running into a little bit more of a friction to get them to sign up. So I would say, identify what your must haves are, use those, required, that’s gonna be the email address. That’s one just right off the bat. Maybe you need first name, maybe not, maybe it makes more sense to have the city or somebody’s birthday. I would say probably for birthday, more personalized email with their name and their birthday probably makes sense.

Tyler: Consider the nice to haves there, and they give and implement the automation section and set up a welcome email for that, and then you can ask for that information. Welcome email, some of the good method to keep your bury [SP] to entry really short on your sign-up form, you can ask for that later.

Miles: Yeah. Got another question from Kevin. Kevin has…he has a Windows tablet, but not an iPad, can you get the Guestbook app? At the moment, it’s iPad-only, but I’m happy to…I’ll send your feedback along to our product team and let them know because they’re always looking for feedback around that. Thanks, Kevin.

Tyler: So we got a question from Jordan Jornast [SP], “How often do you consider sending a re-engagement campaign?” That’s a really great question and that can…we can sit here for another hour and talk re-engagement, but I think in a pretty concise answer, I would say we typically recommend to consider re-engagement or at least consider your inactive subscribers every six months. I would say, at the very least, you do that every single year, and this is a really great time to do that here at the beginning of the year while it’s all fresh, you’re considering your email marketing goals would be every year, but what we would really recommend is probably every six months considering who your inactive subscribers, and then figuring out what to do with those, with the recommendations that we presented here on this webinar.

Miles: Yeah, that was a really good question. We got a question from Stephanie, and this goes back to at the very beginning where we’re talking about list growth, “How would I use the information from another app’s integration?” So maybe something from like Eventbrite or…

Tyler: Shopify.

Miles: Shopify and ticketing platform. I say number one, attendance. Automatically sending a welcome email or any type of timely content to the folks that attended the event. Even the survey works in that scenario, like have a list of questions, maybe like follow-up information you wanna get from them. They came to the booth, you probably got their business cards, standard badge, use that as an opportunity to get a little bit more information to learn more about that person.

Another example would be, we kind of touched on the timeliness of restaurant marketing a little bit with, you know, the bottle of wine deal, but if they make a reservation, you can send content-based on…you can use the location information that you have and send content based on that. Or even, you know, have a special promotional deal, like I said, half off bottle of wine, those kind of deals. I feel like I’m really selling the half off bottle of wine..

Tyler: Maybe you take that off from Miles.

Miles: I know. Yeah, so sending follow-up information to people tend to be a bad…send them content after they make a reservation, those are great examples of content you can send using data you get from that integration. Thank you, Stephanie. All right, I think we’re a little bit over time, so I just want to wrap everything up. Tyler, thank you so much for being here and imparting your wisdom to us.

Tyler: No, thanks for having me.

Miles: But some key takeaways or some best ways you can grow your subscriber list, collect those new sign-ups anywhere you can. Use that Guestbook iPad app, use sign-up forms on your website, even the legal pad is not such an outdated method. So use that. Segmentation and automation are gonna be keys to improving engagement that lets you kind of take your finger off the send button and that lets you really find out who your targeted group of customers are. How do we re-engage with those not so active subscribers, and obviously identifying them to kind of figure out, like, you wanna really drill down into the more active customers. We covered some list types, you can stop there.

Tyler: Yeah, and I’ll say as we…

Miles: Oh, yeah, we’re sending that.

Tyler: Yeah, so we’re gonna send the webinar recording to you. It’ll be within the next few days, so just keep an eye out for that. And then I’ll also say that if you’re looking for a little bit of help in implementing some of these concepts that we’ve talked about today or just looking for an outside perspective from an expert who’s in the field everyday, we do have the professional services team. So that’s what I get to do is come alongside brands. That’s what my team, you know, our team gets to do is come alongside brands, work specifically on their goals. We have tons of different services offerings for you, you might want a little bit more training on some of the features that you saw today. We have training services as well as strategy-based services, you know, couple of dimension there, like our blue print service where we’ll conduct a full account audit for you or an email marketing strategy audit for you. We’ll write up a comprehensive strategy document. We’ll have a consultation where we walk through some specific best practices for you.

And also, another service I’m thinking of is, if you’re a little bit more data-focused like me and you wanna be able to back some of these decisions not just, you know, conceptually but looking at hard data and saying, “Is segmentation worth it? Is re-engagement worth it?” We have a service called a strategic review, where we’ll take your account analytics, analyze those, identify trends. And from there, we can recommend some great benchmarks for you and specific applications of these features in Emma. So lots of services to choose from. You can head over to myemma.com/services to fill out a request form if you’re just interested in hearing a little bit more about those offerings and maybe gauging and see if our team could help you with your needs.

Miles: All right. Thank you, Tyler. Thank you, everybody, for joining us. We had a blast. We will be doing more webinars in the future so stay tuned. And reach out if you have any questions and we’ll send the recording and the webinar slides to all the attendees, whether you attended or not, so keep an eye on your inbox and we’ll talk to you all later. Bye.

Tyler: Bye.